EDUCATION POLICY WITH BIAS TO ICT INTEGRATION IN EDUCATION

This qualitative phenomenological case study explored the lived experiences of a purposive sample of 20 current and past early education teachers who have experience in assessing children through observational assessment. The purpose of this study was to determine if bias affects the documentation of observational assessment and the implementation of the graduated teacher’s teaching methods. The study included 20 interviews of teachers who spoke verbal responses to qualitative open-ended questions in recorded sessions. Data from interviews, literature, and theory were transcribed and analyzed by using the Nvivo9 program. Five themes emerged from the triangulated Nvivo analysis. One of the significant findings was the unexpected outcome found that 55 percent of teachers identified an influence of oral bias. The discovery of the findings left several new unanswered questions that are recommended for further study to continue the improvements of Early Education assessments: Further research is recommended to find what influence teacher bias has on child development. The final recommendation for further research includes a study that will prove or disprove the new model (Appendix K) created with this paper.
ISBN: 978-1-303-14971-9

A test is a tool for making quantified value judgments and/or comparisons, and a good test is a bias-free gauge that does its value judgments and quantifications with precision. This requires that the test be at least reliable. In applied linguistics in general, and in TESOL in specific, the question of test reliability has always been at the forefront of all test construction activities. As high-stakes gate-keeping tests gained more and more importance in a globalizing postindustrial world, the statistical procedures used to estimate their reliability indices, too, became more and more complex and precise. Classical Test Theory (CTT) is no longer preached, and test developers and testing agencies have resorted to Generalizability Theory (G-Theory) and Item Response Theory (IRT) as their main dishes; more recently, they have decided to spice up their activities with Differential Item Functioning (DIF). This paper seeks to provide the lessversed reader with a short and simple account of these topics. The aim of this paper is to turn the tumid prose describing complex mathematical and statistical topics in psychometrics and measurement into readable English so that students less versed in the field can make sense of them, and university professors can use the paper as a simple and informative source in their teaching activities.